Will California send National Guard troops to patrol the border?

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President Trump on Thursday offered the first details of his plan to send the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying he envisions 2,000 to 4,000 troops to help stop drug smugglers and illegal immigrants until his border wall is built.

But since individual states — not the Oval Office — must dispatch National Guard troops for non-military activities, one of the major questions still hanging over the president’s controversial proposal is whether California — the heart of resistance against the Trump administration — will take part.

Republican governors in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona are all on board to send troops, but officials in the Golden State were still mum Thursday on whether they’ll do the same.

“This request – as with others we’ve received from the Department of Homeland Security, including those for additional staffing in 2006 and 2010 – will be promptly reviewed to determine how best we can assist our federal partners,” California National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Keegan said in a statement issued on behalf of Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. “We look forward to more detail” on funding and the length of the deployment.

Brown’s office deferred questions to the California National Guard, and it’s unclear when a decision will be made.

Trump told reporters on Air Force One Thursday that his administration is looking at the costs of deploying troops at the border and that “we’ll probably keep them or a large portion of them” until the border wall is built. The number of troops would be lower than the 6,400 National Guard members that former President George W. Bush sent to the border between 2006 and 2008.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Wednesday announced the proposal to send National Guard troops to the border to prevent “unacceptable levels of illegal drugs, dangerous gang activity, transnational criminal organizations, and illegal immigration.”

Reports of the Trump administration enlisting the National Guard to secure the border began surfacing last year after an 11-page White House memo obtained by the Associated Press showed the administration considered mobilizing up to 100,000 troops in 11 states. The White House denied the plans at the time.

Trump reintroduced the idea again this week following reports that a caravan of Central American migrants is making its way through Mexico to get to the U.S. Though Mexican officials have stalled the caravan, some of the immigrants — the majority of whom are from Honduras — are said to be making their way north.

“The crisis at our Southwest border is real,” Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton said in a statement Thursday. “The number of illegal border crossings during the month of March shows an urgent need to address the ongoing situation at the border.

“We need to close these dangerous loopholes that are being taken advantage of each and every day, gain operational control of the border, and fully fund the border wall system. As the President has repeatedly said, all options are on the table.”

Border arrests at ports of entry in March increased 37 percent over arrests made in February and 203 percent over arrests made in March 2017, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Meanwhile, an estimated 37,390 people were arrested by U.S. Border Patrol in the southwest border region — meaning they weren’t arrested at ports of entry — in March, which includes California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That’s compared with 26,662 people arrested in February and 25,978 in January, according to CBP data.

However a broader look at the numbers provide a different picture. During the 2017 fiscal year, the number of people arrested at the border fell to its lowest level since 1971, with border agents making 310,531 arrests — a 24 percent decline from the previous year.

Despite the recent uptick in border activity, many California Democrats dismissed Trump’s decision as solely political, and urged Brown to turn down the president. Former State Senate leader and U.S. Senate candidate Kevin de León wrote Brown a letter Thursday urging him to “reject requests to deploy the California National Guard to assist in an ill-defined mission to address a nonexistent threat.”

“The fact of the matter is, we’re seeing the lowest number of attempts to come into the country illegally since 1971,” Eshoo said in an interview Thursday. “This is not a crisis — but the president is not given to facts.”

In 2006, President Bush asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to deploy California national guard troops in defense of the Mexican border, as the number of illegal crossings grew. Schwarzenegger signed off on sending 1,000 troops, but denied Bush’s requests for additional manpower. He also sent 224 troops to the border in 2010 when President Obama requested 1,200 troops along the southwest border.

Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked for Schwarzenegger, said it’s politically advantageous both for Trump to call out the guard and for Brown to resist him on deploying the troops.

“They’re not at the border catching people, they really play more of a logistics role,” Walsh said. “What it does do is it sends a message to people coming from other countries that we’re not going to simply let you walk in.”

Republicans in Congress have applauded Trump’s request, but immigration advocates expressed fury over Trump’s decision, saying it will further militarize the border and criminalize immigrants coming to the U.S.

“Trump’s plan to send troops to border communities is yet another attempt to demonize immigrants and is utterly out of touch with reality,” said Kamal Essaheb, policy and advocacy director at the National Immigration Law Center in a statement. “It is intended only to distract from real issues facing our country, and to appease Trump, who is increasingly angry that his border wall vanity project has stalled. Every American should be outraged by this wasteful, damaging, and opportunistic use of taxpayer dollars.”

Tatiana Sanchez covers race, demographics and immigration for the Bay Area News Group. She got her start in journalism in the California desert, where she covered the marginalized immigrant communities of the eastern Coachella Valley. Before heading north, Sanchez spent a year as immigration reporter at the San Diego Union-Tribune, where she covered the region's multicultural communities, social justice topics and life on the U.S. -Mexico border. A Bay Area native, she received a master's in journalism from Columbia University. In 2017, Sanchez was part of a team of East Bay Times reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland. She's based in San Jose.

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